Adjuncts in the City: a horror story (?)
Adjuncts in the City: a horror story (?)
by Jonah Howell
In light of our upcoming event “is academia dead?” on 9/19 featuring K.C. Johnson, Jonah Howell, and Hamilton Craig, we’re unlocking Jonah’s piece on adjuncting in NYC. RSVP to the event here.
The “adjunct” professor grows by the day more prominent in American universities, though the category itself is loosely defined. Some academics, and some institutions, use the term as an equivalent to “part-time and non-tenure-track.” But many of those institutionally contracted as “adjuncts” pick up enough teaching work to be considered full-time (though often without the benefits and protections that would otherwise be provided), and what many colleges call “lecturers” would fit the same description. Of the scarce studies of working conditions for adjuncts nationally, most rely on self-reported adjunct status.
In New York, though, the term is a tad clearer. An adjunct, around these parts, is generally either a graduate student who’s taken on a teaching assignment beyond that required by their graduate fellowship (generally a minimum of one class per semester) or an older academic who never managed to get tenure or never entered the tenure-track. A 2020 report at Inside Higher Ed described the condition of adjuncts as a “nightmare” in which “25 percent…rely on public assistance, and 40 percent struggle to cover basic household expenses” because of a typical yearly income of $25,000. The same report quotes the American Federation of Teachers’ gentle prediction that this situation would become “more perilous” post-pandemic. This turned out to be a gross understatement.
The situation here’s been volatile as a bottle of ether for years, and several of the folks I talked to have either been under attack for other statements or been fired from New York universities in the past year or two as a result of a wave of strikes organized by graduate teachers and adjuncts.
Some background: Columbia’s grad student teachers went on strike for four months in 2021 and eventually got a new union contract and wage increases after the University violated national labor laws by threatening to fire them for it in December. In April of the same year, NYU’s grad students went on strike under the same union banner—the GSOC-UAW—and similarly succeeded. Through the same union, the New School’s student workers started striking only a couple days before I finished this draft, on March 6, 2024.
Over the last month, some members of the City University of New York’s Professional Staff Congress (or PSC) have organized a strike school for grad student teachers and adjuncts in preparation for similar action, though the union’s higher-ups are extremely wary of such talk. CUNY’s folks face problems there that the private strikers don’t, in the form of the Taylor Law, which prohibits New York public employees from striking, threatening jail time for union leaders and fines equal to salary (already lost during a strike, so the fine is effectively double) to be slapped on the union for each strike participant.
But that’s a bit far afield. The gist is that the Empire State of adjuncting is dire, to say the least.
…with, naturally, some caveats. Here’s where I start leaning on interviews, and for their sake, I hope you’ll forgive me if I name their subjects with initials. In a talk with one of the PSC leaders, whom I’ll call G, I was told that that “there’s a major split in our union that Columbia and NYU didn’t have, in that we’ve got grad student adjuncts, older adjuncts, and tenure-track folks in the same organization. Naturally that embeds in the structure of the union several conflicts of interest, even if each group’s trying with genuine good will to help the others. So it takes longer, and takes more convincing, in terms of proving broad-based support, to get anything going.”
That “split in the union” has been registered in some studies as a separation between adjuncts and non-adjuncts, or between adjuncts and those who, in the TIAA Institute’s words, “have additional employment outside higher education or have retired.” And though, in those terms, the split is illusory—if you ever meet an adjunct professor who doesn’t either work at more than one college or have an under-the-table side-job, you’ve found a unicorn—there is another type of truth to it.
Another adjunct professor at a small private university in New York, let’s call her G2, waxed loving about her position: “I can teach, and I can work on other things in a way I couldn’t if I were tenured and had to put extra hours toward faculty meetings and other departmental housekeeping. So it’s perfect for me now, but I will say, if I were thirty years younger, I’d fight hard to have to go to those department meetings.”
I must admit, though I’m closer to the age and station of G, my own views fall closer to those of G2. I took a job as an adjunct professor because it would allow me to pursue other projects.
By which I mean the real split in the union—between those who, like me, are more or less content with how the adjuncting system works, despite its abysmal pay, and those who find in it a real threat and discontent—is not a difference in age or stage of career, as it’s often framed, but a difference in the expectations each side applies to the university system in which we work.
A recently released adjunct professor at Columbia University—can we call him G3? His name doesn’t start with G, but we’ve established the pattern, and if we keep going like this we’ll develop our own G20 and maybe gain some real bargaining power—told me that he “reminded [his] students constantly to question the structure and purpose of the university system. It isn’t there to be your friend. It’s not a personal God. It’s there to make money, which it does by bringing students in, producing a few students who will be good donors later, and cutting costs.”
Most often, I hear other adjuncts explain the spread of adjuncting as a teaching modality as a result of corporate-university cost-cutting and the quick metastasis of administrative positions and salaries in higher education. But G3’s statement holds something more nuanced: The current money-making university needs to bring in more students and produce a few who will be good donors—the rest are good donors a priori through tuition. As a sidenote: Separating for-profit from other universities is absurd. Public universities get direct state funding, sure, but even private institutions—especially in the hard sciences—operate largely on state-associated grants, and public universities charge ever-increasing tuitions (at times contradicting state constitutions to do so), so that the difference is so complicated as to be the subject of, not just another essay, but a book-length series thereof.
But we can focus here on those two drives: bringing in more students and producing a few good donors. Bringing in more students, at a basic level, means opening more classes, and at a second level, means offering classes as lures to students who have not traditionally been majorities among college attendees.
As I was told by a long-tenured professor in literature, say G4, “there are no tenure-track jobs in this field unless you’re doing specific ethnic studies or regional studies.” For the more canonical stuff, for Shakespeare and the like, and to teach intro classes to those ever-growing numbers of students, there’s adjuncting.
Certain right-wingers interpret this as a trench-shift in a culture war, an intentional stripping of tenure’s protections from those less visibly aligned with progressive agendas, or, less incendiarily, as a deprioritization of the Western canon, but in my eyes it boils down to logistics: As more works are translated, and as the demographics of American cities shift, there are more students motivated and qualified to study works not traditionally canonical and more authors available to such study in English, and thus a demand for new professors to cater to that demand. At the same time, for every recent dissertation on Shakespeare or Milton, there’s a mid-career professor who’s studied the same material since the young gun was a pick-up line in dad’s mouth.
That is, socioeconomic and demographic shifts outside the academy act as integral forces behind the growing dominance of adjuncting in ways not countenanced by simple cynicism about corpo-university cost-cutting and administrative bloat. G.K. Chesterton’s prophecy that schools would “teach children dogmas younger than they are” hovers ghostly upon the wall as a Zoom background filter. Accelerating changes in cultural trends, technological developments, and global population movements put pressure on universities to change curricula more and more often, incentivising an ever less permanent workforce.
Outside the humanities, we see a similar pattern. Two recent computer science graduates—G5, G6—told me, in unison, “We haven’t yet been asked to use anything we learned in college on the job. Everything’s post-hire training.” That is, in the more technical, typically higher-paying fields, the pressures of accelerating change are no less opposed to traditional tenure than in the humanities. So if a university is trying to produce more high-quality donors, it hires a cheap “Legion of Temps” (the American Federation of Teachers’ words) to teach those introductory comp-sci and engineering classes—or hires experienced adjuncts from outside the academic track who know the frontiers of the applied field in a way professors’ specialized and necessarily retrospective research prevents them from knowing it. What’s the line from Hegel? “The owl of Minerva only flies after dusk.”
Closer to linguistic and cultural fundamentals, the title “professor” carries clear religious connotations: To profess the faith, or to profess one’s “vocation,” literally the “calling” granted one by God. Early precursors to the modern university cropped up in the medieval Arab world as Muslim religious institutions, a form which made its way into Mediterranean Catholic society via cosmopolitan Italian lords who courted international scholars for prestige just prior to the Renaissance. Skip a year or a few hundred, and the Puritans are laying bricks for Harvard, named for the preacher John Harvard. We have to remember, talking about higher education in the States, and especially in the northeast, that until very recently, the whole shebang was underwritten by religious fervor (and financed by the unquestionability of the same). The professor was a clergyman, just as the Islamic imam is expected to act as resident scholar for his mosque’s ummah.
Over time, the profession became more a class signifier than a religious one, though the cultural association between professor and monk remained—the gathering in solitude of arcane knowledge for dissemination now not to the religious elite but to the increasingly entrenched American aristocracy. Standard public university curricula from the late 19th century include just enough of math and the sciences to handle industrial leadership, then a slew of courses on classical languages and rhetoric, intended to make sure the colleged gentleman could hold his own at high-society functions.
The comparatively recent democratization of the university, and with it the profession, may, like most “democratizations,” be as easily called a secularization. The demotion of traditional canon—whether in the humanities, its most obvious case, or in the hard sciences in the dethroning of Newton’s physics in favor of relativity, or in math after Gödel’s incompleteness proofs and Cantor’s nuanced notions of infinity—that demotion from solid and sacred to mutable and profane requires a mutability in the university that, for most of its long history, it hasn’t had to muster.
Hence the shift from professorial tenure to the “Legion of Temps.” As the state of each field shifts on a year-to-year, even semester-to-semester basis, each granting of tenure becomes a riskier gamble.
But while that historical context provides some explanatory power for the rise of adjuncting in New York’s universities, and in the States generally, it also implies that over time, the adjuncts themselves become vanishingly more interchangeable and thus disposable, so it only shoves into sharper focus the dire situation of those who have become adjuncts, literally “additions,” linguistically and essentially peripheral. CUNY’s adjunct professors make, with a crowded teaching load of three bi-weekly courses per semester, well below the city’s median income. Many take in, after taxes, around the national adjunct average of $25,000 per year, which, with post-pandemic inflation, equates in the city to constant desperation.
So the strikes make good sense, even as historical developments in the academy make the strikes’ causes appear more or less inevitable. That seeming inevitability, of course, does nothing to devalue the strikes, nor does it render them futile, as the successes at Columbia and NYU have demonstrated.
This essay advocates no systemic changes in the university like opening new pathways to tenure or rearranging administrative structures, as I see no clear route to such things and thus consider arguments in that vein good for little but virtue-signaling. But while I myself think I’m paid about right for the teaching I do, I also realize that many in my line of work would prefer to live on one line of work and consider it not a privilege but a brutal necessity that we cannot, especially given the high level of training and skill that adjuncting requires. Counterexamples to the general disgruntlement, like interviewee G2 and myself, do not cancel the claims of our co-workers, but rather show the banal truth, illegible to political discourse, that different people have different preferences. That said, though, if a strike were called tomorrow, I don’t know one adjunct who would cross the picket line, and that, at base, is the realpolitik of the thing.
Jonah Howell writes and teaches literature in New York. His play Lillita and the Tramp will open in May at the Hudson Guild Theatre.
Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content.
Also check out Stephen’s piece on adjuncting at corporate colleges, and our pod ep with @philosophergames meme page admin Jacob Bauer on the state of college philosophy departments.
If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MASA tortilla chips by Ancient Crunch is offering our followers 10% off their order with the promo code CRACKSINPOSTMODERNITY. Click here to redeem.
graphics by @revolvingstyle
 |
|